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01 Apr 2015 9:49:09am

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The analogy to a moral landscape that Sam Harris actually provides is one with multiple peaks and valleys of what he calls human fruition. Okay so he no more defines a locus of good and evil than anyone else in so doing (nor claims to), but he does give the individual decision making process a variable locus relative to a range of factors some of which he asserts may be more or less empirical. I don’t see him claiming that everything is determinately empirical in nature so much as recognising that science can tell us some things about how some decisions affect our well being in specific kinds of ways. The suggestion he makes is that further scientific discoveries are quite likely to inform greater well being, and therefore quite possibly a kind of morality based on a range of possible factors influencing our decision making. That of and by itself may never explain how and why we can frequently come to a perfectly reliable decision without scientific analysis, but it points out that this is in fact the opposite hypothesis.

It asks the question in an extremely interesting way in that it does not propose solutions in terms of moral absolutes in quite that way that I think is being criticised here. Instead it simply seems to ask things like whether if science were to approach an understanding of psychology might it be able to predict or supply better moral judgements than we currently arrive at. And at the same time it also asks whether accepting the very real possibility that at least some morality can be analysed infers that even with the crude understanding we have thus far we ought to be able to draw some general conclusions about some of the more faulty traditions and influences we have in the world today. I don't think in that sense he is really making a bigger a claim for science to play its part than scrutiny can bear.

To the extent that he goes on to hypothesise that if some morality looks scientifically solvable then given the data collection and analysis tools we may be able to solve more I think he recognises a possibility rather than necessarily making the kinds of claims that are already being questioned here. Anyone with a working understanding of science could tell you that certainty is rather illusory.